Techniques are provided for automatically deploying software packages. Management agents represent these packages, a logical tree represents the deployed structure, and a node of the tree represents a management agent. A node that does not have any child node is referred to as a leaf node. A recursive process associated with at least one repository generates the structure. The repositories include information for configuring the nodes and thus control the deployment process. During deployment, a non-leaf node, referred to as an initiator node, uses information received from a corresponding repository to generate its child nodes. A child node, if being an initiator node, recursively generates its child nodes until the recursive process stops as there is no additional child node to be generated. Further, node identifiers are automatically established and assigned to respective nodes. Those identifiers are used by software instances such as management agents represented by nodes to communicate with other software instances such as repositories or directories for registering information about nodes, looking up information about other nodes, etc.